The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power, and the Future of the World (13 page)

Such pop culture overtures continued for decades. In the 1980s one U.S.-funded agency, Population Communication Services, commissioned musicians—including Nigeria’s King Sunny Ade—to sing songs celebrating family planning.
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The organization got a Menudo-era Ricky Martin to perform in a video in the Philippines promoting an adolescent sex information hotline.

“The early family planning programs in the sixties and seventies especially did a lot of that public educational stuff,” said Germain. “They trained journalists, they had billboards, they did all this media work—huge investments, actually. It was a massive social and behavioral change investment of a kind we had never before seen.” Indeed, she pointed out, international family planning programs, especially those in Asia, became a paradigm of successful social engineering that would be studied in both university classrooms and on Madison Avenue.

But even as norms were changing and more women sought to have fewer children, contraceptives remained far from perfect. Having decided on smaller families, women were less inclined to simply accept unwanted pregnancies. Thus, in some countries, the demand for abortion increased even as birth control became more popular. “[W]ithin particular populations, contraceptive prevalence and the incidence of induced abortion can and, indeed, often do rise in parallel, contrary to what one would expect,” concluded an article in the journal
International Family Planning Perspectives
.

According to researchers Cicely Marston and John Cleland, in societies “that have not yet entered the fertility transition,” people either want big families or don’t consider childbearing “within the calculus of conscious choice,” meaning there’s little concept of “unwanted” pregnancies. They may have been overstating the case, since folk methods of contraception, as well as abortion and infanticide, have existed in many premodern cultures, suggesting a common desire to limit childbearing. Nevertheless, such control is imperfect at best, leading to a degree of fatalism about family size.

The introduction of modern contraception with its ideals of family planning tends to upend this resigned acceptance, spurring people to actively try and exert more control over their reproduction. “Thus,” Marston and Cleland wrote, “as contraceptive prevalence rises and fertility starts to fall, an increasing proportion of couples want no more children (or want an appreciable delay before the next child), and exposure to the risk of unintended pregnancy also increases as a result.”
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As the article showed, this correlation is only temporary; in most societies the use of effective birth control eventually becomes widespread enough to send abortion rates down. Nevertheless, in their early stages family planning programs weren’t there for many women with unintended pregnancies—even though the very concept of an unintended pregnancy was one they’d help establish. (Not surprisingly, this isn’t something most family planners like to discuss, since it seems to play right into the hands of their right-wing critics.)

G
ermain’s frustration at the Population Council kept building, so when, in 1972, she got a recruiting call from the Ford Foundation—the same place that had written her off just two years earlier—she jumped at it. (The man who’d rejected her because she was married was still there. Ironically, she’d since been divorced.) At the time the Ford Foundation was one of the leading funders of international family planning programs, and once she was hired she wrote a memo critiquing the foundation’s lack of attention to the circumstances of women’s lives. Poor women, she argued, have very good reasons for having big families. If you want them to have fewer children, you need to give them more than contraception—you need to give them options, including education and employment. Her memo so impressed her bosses that they gave her a new job as a project specialist tasked with figuring out how to make the foundation’s programs support women.

In 1973—the year she turned twenty-six—Germain used her own money and vacation time to travel to the Philippines and Pakistan to check out Ford Foundation programs. Filipino strongman Ferdinand Marcos had made population control a major priority, and officials at Ford were considering supporting a scheme that would financially reward plantation workers in Mindanao, a Muslim separatist community under military occupation, for having smaller families, and penalize them for having larger ones.

Such ideas had been in vogue for the previous few years. In 1969, Bernard Berelson, president of the Population Council, had published an influential article titled “Beyond Family Planning,” which surveyed proposals for new approaches to reducing birthrates, including incentives, antinatalist taxes, and compulsory sterilization. Berelson rejected the more extreme ideas, although rather wanly: “The ‘heavy’ measures—involuntary means and political pressures—may be put aside for the time being, if not forever.”
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Germain had been a strong critic of Berelson’s piece, but the local Ford office didn’t know that. Assuming she was onboard with her old boss’s ideas, they arranged for her to be taken, with a military escort, to Mindanao in order to assess the feasibility of a proposed incentive scheme. She was driven around by a commander who was “just sexist, outright,” she recalled, through an area where most people were living in a condition close to serfdom. The idea of bribing a captive minority population into having fewer children—and punishing them for having more—shocked her. “I was just so taken aback that anybody would even
think
of doing this kind of work in that kind of circumstance,” she said. (In the end, Ford didn’t get involved.)

“[T]hese scenes were to repeat themselves across my work life—in the northeast part of Brazil, which is one of the most impoverished areas of the world, actually, especially in those days, and of course in India and other countries,” she said. “And again, I didn’t have a problem with providing family planning to women, or even a problem with thinking about population growth as an issue, but I did feel very strongly that you could not treat any human beings in this way.”
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From the Philippines she went to Pakistan. Trying to be culturally sensitive, she wore a burqa, which suffocated her. “You can’t breathe, but more important than that, you have no peripheral vision, and what little you can see through the embroidered screen is such a distorted view of the world,” she said. “And it became an image for me, a very physical, tangible image, of how restricted and constrained women’s views and opportunities and voices are.”
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R
eturning to New York, Germain tried to pull her experiences together in an article; it was eventually published as an op-ed in the
New York Times
in August 1975. Titled “A Major Resource Awaiting Development: Women in the Third World,” it began, “Who does the major part of the work in poor countries? Women do. Yet they are probably the most underrated economic resource in ‘resource-poor’ third world countries.” Germain argued that helping women improve their economic productivity is key to fighting poverty. First-world governments and international organizations, she said, should “support women’s organizations as a focal point for work, a source of credit, training, information and community power.” They should “develop and distribute work-saving devices (such as wheelbarrows) to lighten the burden of work, and organize training programs in simple accounting, for example, to increase women’s productivity.”
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It’s now conventional wisdom in development circles that the economic empowerment of women is key to fighting poverty and child mortality—and, in sub-Saharan Africa, to fighting HIV. At the time, though, these were radical ideas. The pioneering Danish economist Ester Boserup had published
Women’s Role in Economic Development
in 1970, but much more needed to be learned. One of the tasks Germain set herself at Ford was generating just such research, contributing to the burgeoning new field of feminist economics. “We first documented that 80 percent of the agricultural production in sub-Saharan Africa comes from women, and they own 1 percent of the land,” she said. “All those findings were generated in the 1970s.”

In the years to come such work would contribute to fresh ways of looking at the distribution of resources within families. In the 1980s and 1990s new research on intrafamily economics would reveal that, contrary to conservative shibboleths, households aren’t single economic units, with each member working toward the collective good. Instead, they’re full of power struggles and competing interests, with the relative prestige of men and women determining whose needs will be met. When men control all the resources in a household, both their wives and their children tend to suffer. Women who can make financial decisions spend most of their money on their families, Germain explained, “whereas the expenditure surveys with men clearly document the leisure time, the cigarettes, the alcohol, the unnecessary clothes, like western-style shirts.”
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Furthermore, women who work outside the home increase their status and their decision-making power
inside
it, as economists would make clear in the ensuing decades. “While women work long hours every day at home, since this work does not produce a remuneration it is often ignored in the accounting of the respective contributions of women and men in the family’s joint prosperity,” wrote the Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen in his 1999 book
Development as Freedom
. “When, however, the work is done outside the home and the employed woman earns a wage, her contribution to the family’s prosperity is more visible. She also has more voice, because of being less dependent on others. The higher status of women even affects, it appears, ideas on the female child’s ‘due.’ ”
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Thus, the more agency women have, the more likely their children are to be taken care of, something clearly seen in the correlation between child survival and female literacy. “The extent to which maternal education has been identified as a major—or even the major—factor in determining child mortality is astonishing, although even this finding merely provides clues to the forces at work rather than a simple answer,” the demographer John C. Caldwell wrote in 1990.
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Common sense suggests that women who’ve been to school would have higher incomes and better access to health care information, but the effect of female education on children’s health appears to go far beyond that. “There is compelling evidence that the impact of maternal education on child survival is not merely a case of learning more about health,” Caldwell found. “The most important evidence is that it occurs everywhere: in good schools with good teachers who do teach about health and in poor schools with underqualified teachers who devote no time to the subject, as well as in every part of the Third World.”

Caldwell’s explanation for this is cultural as much as material. Women who have some education are more likely to demand family resources for their children, to have the confidence to take action when their children are sick, and to persist as long as the illness continues. If an uneducated woman does take her child to a doctor but doesn’t see any subsequent improvement, she often won’t report the problem to him, “partly on the grounds that she cannot tell an important man he has failed,” Caldwell wrote.
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And, of course, educated women are more likely to use family planning, itself strongly correlated with declines in child mortality.
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“In terms of policy analysis, there is much evidence now, based on intercountry comparisons as well as interregional contrasts within a large country, that women’s empowerment (including female education, female employment opportunities and female property rights) and other social changes (such as mortality reduction) have a very strong effect in reducing fertility rate[s],” wrote Sen.
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Thus, the research Germain was involved in led to a new way of thinking about overpopulation—one that saw it as the symptom of women’s oppression rather than as a crisis that trumped individual women’s rights. Give women what they need to thrive, the new findings suggested, and they’d solve some of the world’s most pressing problems.

W
hile Germain was doing this work at Ford, Joan Dunlop was undertaking a similar investigation for John D. Rockefeller III. Raised outside of London, Dunlop was the rebellious daughter of a wealthy family. At twenty-one she ran away to the United States, living for a time in a Manhattan Salvation Army hostel, where she shared a room with the daughter of a Mississippi chicken farmer.
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She never went to college, but, starting as a secretary at the Ford Foundation, she worked her way up through the public policy world, eventually serving in the administration of New York City mayor John Lindsay. In 1972 she was working as the assistant director of a small New York foundation when she got a call from Rockefeller’s office asking her to lunch with him at the Algonquin.

It was the beginning of five months of interviews, after which Dunlop— despite her total lack of experience in family planning, demographics, or international issues—was hired to head up Rockefeller’s population interests. Why her? She’s still not quite sure. “What he always said to me is, ‘I wanted somebody outside the field, because the field needs new blood,’ ” she said. He had a sense that something was wrong in the population world but wasn’t sure what it was.

He was also looking for someone who would care as much as he did about safe abortion. “When we talked about abortion he said, ‘You won’t fail me, will you?’ ” Dunlop recalled. “Meaning, you won’t be equivocal about the abortion issue. And I then said there’s no way, because I’ve had an illegal abortion, and let me tell you what it was about. And that point, I felt, was the deciding point for him.”